I digress. We're talking about interband trade, not what occurs within the band. Still, I think it's an important insight when moving on to that question about "trading" women. Hunter-gatherer cultures don't tend to be as heirarchic as other cultures. The idea of trading women implies a right to command their coming and going, and in a small group of 20-30 people who either raised you or grew up with you, all of them adept at surviving in what we'd consider to be wilderness, imposing your will like that can be tricky. The groups vary considerably, but it's more an issue of the dynamics of the particular group and the individuals within it than anything intrinsic to hunter-gatherer cultures. Bottom line: don't expect to be able to "trade" a hunter-gatherer woman of your own band unless she's willing to go along with the deal. If she's agreeing to go join another band or to take a stranger who's joining your band, then there is a fair degree of informed consent involved rather than coercion.

(Enslaving others on anything beyond a very small scale would be a bit unusual. That person needs to be able to carry their own weight, literally and figuratively speaking. A couple or so people might be so taken, but much more than that and the band itself becomes endangered - the slave population becomes big enough to be a threat itself. The Native Americans of the Northeast had this thing where they would take prisoners and then gradually work them into the tribe's culture over the years until they were part of the tribe.)

On the question of violence, hunter-gatherers are also not as territorial as more modern cultures. When you number 30 or so souls including children and elders, when you can carry everything you own without feeling too weighed down, and when your medical technology consists of no more than a needle and thread, bandages, and whatever useful herbs you can puzzle out, there is not a strong incentive to risk your safety in violence to gain or keep territory or material goods that you can easily make yourself. Robbing or killing strangers is no safe game unless you're pretty sure they don't have family or allied bands who will come for vengeance. In fact, merely being in the general vicinity of someone who'd been robbed and killed wasn't very safe since there were no courts to adjudicate such matters and the vengeful likely weren't very picky about targets.

Hunter-gatherer groups are more likely to do violence for interpersonal reasons: feuds and grudges. Don't dis the band. Even those fights tend to be less lethal than those of agricultural and later cultures. On that score, the Neanderthal certainly would not have been the "weaklings" you think. They were physically strong, stronger than Cro-Magnon (technically, European Early Modern Humans, but that's a mouthful). Their brains were as large as their Cro-Magnon counterpart. Their technology was certainly adequate for killing bison and other big game - which also implies a good deal of tactical smarts and teamwork. Cro-Magnon would not have viewed their Neanderthal counterparts as weak, and in person-to-person combat the Neanderthal likely held a slight advantage.

However, if studies of their bones are correct, (what you do tends to show in your bones as wear patterns) Neanderthal lacked a long-range throwing weapon, a significant disadvantage.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28663444

That, however, is not the entire story. A long-range throwing weapon is an advantage over open terrain. It is less of an advantage when the enemy is in your midst, as in heavily forested environments or in the case of a close-range ambush or late night raid on a sleeping encampment. Neanderthal certainly had the intelligence to flee engagements when the odds were against them and to seek to engage under more favorable circumstances. Thus, taking them on would not have been without risk.

Based on that and the fact that Neanderthals and Cro-Magnon shared space for a period of 10-15 thousand years, and the usual behavior of hunter-gatherer groups, my guess is that the Neanderthals were no more nor less likely to face aggression from a Cro-Magnon band than any Cro-Magnon neighbor. I suspect sometimes they were targets, and sometimes they were allies against some other target, and most often they were simply another group in the neighborhood. Being at a technological disadvantage, they suffered gradual attrition over the millenia - the moreso because Cro-Magnon had a much wider diet, while the Neanderthal were very dependent on that large game and may have had more trouble feeding themselves when competitors showed up. Had they been the consistent targets, I would have expected their elimination within decades or centuries, as occurred among overmatched human cultures later in history.

While I can't speak to the psychology of Neanderthals of course, it's far more likely for humans to engage in a consensual pairing of this sort for the simple reason that they had no other likely prospects. Unusual for a healthy person, since the region should have had sufficient resources to support quite a few bands within a reasonable walk of each other (estimates suggest a population density of 4500-6000 per 100 square kilometers). If however a particular person was unacceptable - they had a cleft palate or other minor defect, or they were scarred from some past encounter with disease, or their particular group had managed to offend the other local humans in some way and there were no suitable mates within the group itself - then they might have been willing to expand their list of acceptable candidates to include someone from a neighboring Neanderthal group. And, Neanderthal were not so far removed from Cro-Magnon as to be completely unattractive.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Neanderthal_child.jpg

http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/assets/images/2006/Nov/15-Wed/Neanderthal_2D_src.jpg

http://erectuswalksamongst.us/Chap25.html#Back47

http://blogs.nationalgeographic.com/blogs/news/chiefeditor/2008/09/neanderthal-woman-is-first-rep.html

The modern era includes ample examples of White marrying Black marrying Asian marrying midget marrying giant marrying obese ... you get the point. The pre-modern era includes enough examples that we can be sure this is not exclusively a modern phenomenon. While remaining more or less within phenotype is the norm, exceptions clearly occur. It's clear the Neanderthal form, while a drawback, would not have been an insurmountable barrier to a Cro-Magnon who felt their prospects were otherwise limited.